Design

Take a bow Gabe

You’ve officailly been ripped off. What a thrill! ENVIRONMENTAL TECHNOLOGY Actually, from all the greek, I assume this […]

You’ve officailly been ripped off. What a thrill!
ENVIRONMENTAL TECHNOLOGY

Actually, from all the greek, I assume this is just a trial design? hmm?

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  4. 4
    Hanan Cohen

    Can you tell us how you came about to seeing this site?

    I mean, it’s not officially out so someone from the designing team tipped someone else.

    Right?

  5. 5
    christina

    Anonymous tip from the contact us form on B&A.

    But security through obscurity is not. Slap a htcaccess on that pup or a bot-spider will find it. (in english: password protect it or search engines will find it and people searching on our keywords will find your site through those copied metatags…)

  6. 6
    Jared Spool

    In this case, I don’t think it’s an issue. Upon return to the site today (I wanted to compare it to the B&A design), it’s reverted to something much different. My guess is that the author was just playing around with his own skills — I think it was in a ‘test’ area. http://www.mulvi.com gives a little more insight, I think.

    In terms of protection from this sort of thing, you’ve got copyright and trade dress. (I’ve been an expert witness in cases on both, so I know a little about these things.) Unless someone is copy content, copyright won’t play much of a role. In this case, if the designer were to plug environmental topics into a B&A-like framework, there’s no grounds for copyright infringement on the content.

    There might be a copyright case on the code, but that’s much harder to enforce — copyright has never really been meant to deal with infrastructure and I’m only aware of cases of ‘code copying’ where the products competed. You quickly get into a discussion of “damages” and since B&A doesn’t collect money, it’s going to be a hard discussion.

    Trade Dress (whose laws are similar to trademarks)is another story, tho it would also be a difficult case to make because of the lack of damages. In trade dress, the key phrase is “likelihood of confusion.” Would someone who is looking at the violating site be likely to confuse it for B&A and therefore ‘conduct business’ thinking they were dealing with B&A?

    The most famous instance of this was the Fast Company/F*cked Company debacle. At first, the latter was intended as a parody. But after a while, it lost it’s parody-like qualities and could easily be argued that it was “confusingly similar”. PUD (the owner of F*cked Company) ended up redoing the design as a result.

    (While it’s a parody, it’s actually covered under a ‘fair use’ clause. But there are strict rules for that.)

    Ok. Probably more than you want to know. I guess that’s what makes me an “expert.” (Hoping someday to be a “guru”.)

    Jared

    p.s. That’s twice in 1 week I’ve used “f*ck” in two separate threads — what are the odds of that?

  7. 7
    christina

    I really don’t worry too much about such matters. Personally I really do consider it a compliment. And kinda funny as well. But if I do ever take anyone to court, I want you on my side, Jared. 🙂

  8. 8
    Jared Spool

    Well, funny you mention it. Today I spent the entire day in small claims court, pretending I was a lawyer.

    (I was expecting the other side to hire Jakob to defend themselves. That seems to happen a lot to me.)

    The decision won’t be in for a few days, but based on how the judge was pummeling them with questions and leaving me alone, I think we did ok.

    I did get a chance to write an 8 page brief. Much better than the 82 page brief I wrote the last time I was an expert witness. This one only had two exhibits, while the last one had 125.

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